Very Very Post-trip report: old photos of Yosemite Sierra Club outings 1914-1915
on 08/28/2013 20:14:00 MDT

We recently received a link on a Sierra Club leaders' forum to this website: http://jim.4lipmans.com/RLL/index.html

It contains photos of 1914 and 1915 Sierra Club outings to Yosemite. Lots of wonderful old shots of the area, and of historic figures.

These were digitized by Jim Lipman, whose father Robert Lipman took them all. In the 1914 set, Lipman is shown in photo #170. #39 shows a great pair of hobnailed boots. #162 shows William Colby, secretary of the Club for 46 years, under a massive tree in Hetch Hetchy valley (this was the last Sierra Club trip that was able to camp in the valley).

Nice spotting, Ken! Camp moccasins? Maybe they could be made out of 1/8" CCF...

After posting this to the group of retirees I hike with, I found out that Jim Lipman is actually a member of that group, though he hasn't hiked with them since I started with the group so I hadn't met him. Small world! I wrote to him and got a very nice reply. Among other things, he said:

"When I see people on a Sierra Club Outing wearing a tie and sports coat-like coat, it is clearly another time. But if you look at the places where my father went on the 1915 Outing, you will see that it was clearly another time with regard to where people would go in those days. The 1915 trip was essentially a base camp at Tuolumne Meadows. On that trip my father went down to Waterwheel Falls, went over Mono Pass to Mono Lake and back, and went down to Mt. Ritter and back, and perhaps another trip. And this is all aside from hiking from Yosemite Valley to Tuolumne Meadows and back to start and end the trip. Well, OK, they did have a month for all of this, I think. But I still am impressed at how ambitious they were in exploring the mountains."

I'm impressed at the amount of organization it must have taken to do this with all those people. Kind of like getting everyone to do that at a GGG, for a month...